後宮の烏

This was ok. I expected more fantasy, liked the drama and character interactions, not the world building.

The story consists of little mysteries around ghosts being solved thanks to the main character's magic and the emperor's authority, usually by learning about the ghost's bittersweet past. The mysteries are very simplified. It worked well with this kind of straight forward narrative though it got repetitive and sometimes boring.

The main characters reflect on their pasts and position within the palace throughout the story as they open up to each other little by little. This was my favorite thing about this book together with the small details in the dialogues and the interesting history and myths of the world (not fully explored in this volume though).

My main disappointment was the lack of enough information about the magic system. It's not like there aren't any explanations but I needed more to judge whether a situation is risky or not. I felt absolutely no tension or charm whenever magic was involved.

Really well constructed book - it's split into different mysteries, but doesn't feel like disconnected short stories. Despite the complex fantasy setup there's no infodumping - unlike a lot of fantasy you're left to infer how magic, religion, politics, etc. in this setting work. I'm not terribly invested in the relationship between the two protagonists, which is a bit of a problem because it's pretty important - but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in this book so it's fine.

Difficultywise, I found the sentences fairly clear but the vocabulary is wild. You'd have to be pretty deep into this genre to know a lot of it - there's a bunch of words that weren't in my dictionary, and some that I'm pretty sure are just Chinese. Fortunately, it is very generous with the furigana, so that takes the sting off looking things up.